Atonement
by Aishata
Summary: Reincarnation, wasn't that what Hikigaya wished for in his chuuni fantasies? Back in middle school, wasn't he looking for a reason to be cool despite being the King of Losers? But as it turns out, being burdened with traumatic memories that aren't your own and being aware of horrific truths about the universe is as far from fun as you can get. Ignorance is Bliss, after all.


On your way to your first day at Sobu High School, you were hit by a car. There was a dog, you remember, and the sight of a plain girl in her pajamas, but that was unimportant compared to what was coming.

In the hospital, that very night, the dreams started coming.

You remember it as the definitive turning point of your life. Up until then, you wallowed in your pointless existence, saddled with the burden of knowing that you had no place among the throngs of your peers, yet noting the absurdity of their customs. Maybe, somewhere inside you, you had a kindling anticipation that things would change with high school. If you were honest with yourself, there was a desire for friends, companionship, that pesky third category on the Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

When you look back at your younger self, you laugh. Back then, you were so set in your ways, convinced that the cynical truths you gleaned about your society was absolute. Yet even then, you still wished that you were wrong. If anyone knew you well in those days, they would have likely said, "Now the only direction you can go is up!" Your sister especially, harbored hope that your attitude in life would no longer reflect your dead fish eyes. Maybe give you some Komachi points along the way.

To say the least, when they came, everything seemed to die around you.

The dreams…no, it didn't do them justice to simply call them dreams. It was like they ripped your soul out of your body and placed you into someone else. It was like you died temporarily and became him, and he died temporarily and became you. But his (your?) actions were predestinated, events in the past (present? future?) already set in stone, as unchangeable as the earth spinning 30 kilometers per second around the sun. So, you lived his childhood, his adolescence, his short adulthood, until the point where he accepted death with a hollow core.

He thought the torment would stop, and they did, for him.

For you though, it was a different story.

Humans beings have psychological barriers, mental blocks that obscure one's ability to perform. Once a psychological barrier is crossed, the next time becomes easier and easier. For you, the last psychological barrier was jumping into a swimming pool. For him though, it was killing another person, particularly, his best friend.

To be specific, first, his best friend lodged a .556 mm bullet through her own throat. When that didn't work, he (you?) shot her three more times and attended to what was left of her body. There were, of course, reasons why that happened, but they didn't matter to you because at that point you were begging for the dreams to end.

Seeing his (your?) best friend's grieving mother hanging from the top of her apartment ceiling twisted the knife a little bit deeper, like failures crawling down his (your?) back like a hundred black dirty cockroaches. There was no funeral of course, and nobody seemed to even acknowledge that they were gone. The earth kept orbiting 30 kilometers per second around the sun, and his (your?) not-dead-yet mother continued to cook scrambled eggs with butter on top for breakfast.

Suddenly, it was like everything in the world no longer had color for you. Just the day before, you had your first day at Sobu High School after your release from the hospital. Your biggest worry was whether you could fit in, and your dreams were about a guy who was lucky enough to have a cute best friend who brought him to her house for dinner every day. But that dream marked the last day of blissful delusions.

That morning, when you woke up, brutal reality slammed into your unprotected mind at a thousand miles per hour. A spear of pain slammed straight through your gut, and your entire body spasmed in agony. You held back the bile that leaped into the back of your mouth. Your back arched backwards, and you bent over in pain, grasping your trembling body as tight as you could. Cold sweat ran down your face and dripped onto the linen sheets of your bed.

That…was not real. That…was just a dream. That person (he? you?) was (were?) not you. You were Hikigaya Hachiman, you grew up in a middle-class family and you never witnessed anyone getting burned, stabbed or shot to death. Your biggest problems were high school, and stopping your little sister from adding tomatoes to your meals.

That person was NOT you.

When your mother served you miso soup and scrambled eggs with butter that morning, you stared at your hands, willing the flashbacks of red away. You were Hikigaya Hachiman. You never killed anyone. And besides, unlike that person, you were the enlightened king of loners. He was the idiot who had friends and was stupid enough to expect anything less than pain.

You went to school that day, watching your fellow human beings float aimlessly through their lives. They were like puppets on a string, manipulated by their biological processes and predetermined chemical reactions. The bread you ate during lunch tasted like cardboard, but you finished it anyway, treating your meal like a tedious chore. Your teachers were speaking but their words flew in one ear and out the next. It was just like middle school, all over again, except this time nobody cared knew or cared who you were, which was somehow an improvement in your social life. You saw your three years stretch outwards like an endless grey horizon of boredom and pointlessness.

Was this it? Was this all, it?

When the school bell rang, you trudged to the top of the roof. You wondered if life even had any point and whether anything would matter regardless of what you did. That guy, no matter what he did or how he hard he tried, still failed, and he was closer to a Riajuu than you ever were. It was like the world was intentionally showing you an idealized version of yourself, and then crushing him in front of you. As if it was telling you that you were destined for failure no matter what you did.

So, what was the point?

The image of his best friend stopped you. You remember her bloody fingers trailing across your (his?) face and you (he?) remembered her shuddering body, her dying vocal chords, and everything collapsed together until she looked like a blur of pain.

" _Be nice to your sister, ok? Maybe…in another life…"_

You shove the memories deep deep down, straight into the dark depths of your mind. A bubble slips between your fingers, soaring up to the surface, and again you reach for it and cram it back down. You try again and again, yet it bobs back up from the depths, impervious to your efforts. When it reaches the surfaces, it bursts, and the myriad of colors consume your vision.

A blonde-haired, lightly freckled girl, half-sniffling, half-giggling, overtakes your thoughts. There's another blonde, strikingly similar yet more mature woman, standing over her. More bubbles flit through your fingers, even as you desperately try to cage them.

"No…stop it…"

An amalgamation of recollections assaults you. You smell apple pie, reminisce about three people howling over Mario Kart, and you dream, dream, dream about a best friend and her mother who showered you with all the warm feelings that you, Hikigaya Hachiman, had never experienced. The three weeks in the hospital after the car accident was nothing but a blissful delusion about another you that had the genuine things you always wanted.

Because even if you were the bottom of the social pack, even if your parents were never home, even if youth was evil and you seemed to do nothing but fail, at the very least, your best friend and your surrogate mother were waiting for you at the end of the day, weren't they?

You fall to your knees and grit your teeth, grasping the railings of the roof so hard that your knuckles turn completely white. You were not him, yet you grieved for a best friend and a mother figure you have never met. You act like an assortment of atoms groveling in the expanse of an uncaring universe, an insignificant speck of dust.

Please, you prayed, no more dreams.

But the gods, if there were any, never answered.


End file.
